The Wide Angle: We’re 1/80th the way there

Published 5:40 pm Tuesday, February 27, 2024

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Tuesday was something of an extraordinary day in our household — the installation of a new kitchen faucet.

What makes it exciting isn’t the fact that we now have a faucet that doesn’t require the handle to be placed at a sweet spot to get it to stop dripping. No, that’s rather mundane if that was all that got me excited in life. one my might call me boring.

Rather, it puts us on track for our kitchen remodel. We are now approximately 1/80th the way to finishing the project.

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Of course, we have no idea when the rest of the work will take place, or really when it will even begin, but in our lives, we take our wins where we can get them.

Prior to this the closest we’ve been has been a contractor coming over. We gave him our ideas on what we’re looking at, but naturally, life can be mean sometimes and it doesn’t take much to drain  money away from one project into something else we didn’t want to spend money on.

Most recently, it’s a roof that needs to be re-shingled. No matter how many times I’ve squinted at our roof, trying to convince myself it doesn’t look bad, it all comes back to people smarter than me  saying we need to.

So for the time being, we’re forced to stare daily at our kitchen and dream of what it could be, though we looked around the various home improvement stores this weekend when we purchased our faucet to gather ideas and we have some slightly more solidified plans with at least themes.

Progress!

The problem with that, however, is they put the price tags right out there, proclaiming how reasonable the price is, financing, so on and so forth, but in my off-tilted mind all that does is show me lots of money required and a wallet that feels obscenely light in my back pocket.

I know that remodels aren’t cheap and you don’t want cheap, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that I’m easily frightened by large numbers that I’ll be required to give back to other people.

Most recently, I had to purchase a new laptop, and boy howdy did I not want to do that, but I had to face facts. Each day of opening my old laptop brought with it the threat of a suspect machine totally dying on me, risking the loss of everything and causing me once again to come up with words of a dubious nature not used in polite company.

The same goes for buying cars. Not unlike computers, one should normally enjoy buying a new car. New gadgets, new buttons, new car smell, but for me buying a car is akin to going to the dentist — no offense to the dentists out there, of course.

I’m always afraid I’m going to be missing a number or an item in the buying sheet that seems important and that will bite me in the skinny in the end.

I’m a paranoid person, ripe and open to paranoid thoughts of an unsure future, made more difficult by a kitchen that badly needs a remodel, further complicated by two people that think far outside of their afforded standards.

We tend to think like people with oodles of money to spend, which in turn quickly turns to disappointment every time we don’t win the lottery.

It all comes with being an adult, I suppose, but it only reinforces the idea that I’m not overly fond of being an adult. Being an adult comes with responsibilities. Knowing when to spend money, when not to, how to do it properly, not buying toys and on and on and on.

I don’t want to grow up any more.